Stories about the people, science and research of the Medical Research Council.

Posts tagged ‘MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular medicine’

Professors Irv Weissman and Ravi Majeti at Stanford University and Professor Paresh Vyas at the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit in Oxford, are working on an antibody from the Stanford investigators that enables the immune system to detect and kill cancer cells. They are now testing whether it’s safe and effective for use in people with blood cancer. In this week’s blog they tell us how they collaborated across the Atlantic to get public funding for a project that has led to a spin out with multiple backers and a promising clinical trial.

What if we could make our immune system fight cancer like it fights infection?

These aren’t the only teams in the world grappling with that question but for Professor Irv Weissman and Professor Paresh Vyas, the solution feels tantalisingly close for patients with blood cancer. Read more

Today we released a joint statement with other medical research funders in support of research using gene editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 to advance our understanding of disease in preclinical research and to explore their potential for future therapeutic use. Here our Director of Science Programmes Dr Rob Buckle discusses the huge potential of gene editing, and why any attempt to use it in a therapeutic context must be the subject of the kind of intense and rigorous debate that the scientific community and UK regulatory system has demonstrated in the past.

Being able to edit the human genome is not a new idea or capability. For decades researchers have been developing potential gene therapy techniques to correct missing or faulty DNA and restore healthy gene expression in cells.

More recently, techniques have been developed that can edit the genome in a much more efficient and targeted fashion, and one such example, CRISPR-Cas9, has accelerated the field to such an extent that researchers can now make precise edits to the genome in a relatively easy, speedy, precise and error-free way. Read more

Subscribe to Insight via email

Keep up to date with our latest posts and access your subscriber preferences.